Most people would agree that bullet points in Microsoft Powerpoint are sometimes tricky, and it is really frustrating when the bullets seems always changing and you are constantly re-setting the size, indents and position. In order to create concise, logical and multi-level contents using Powerpoint, one should be able to use bullet points freely.

In general, there are three key tips you should remember and practice constantly, which I shall go into details in the following paragraph. Believe me, all the skills are quite simple, can be learned in just 3 minutes, and will give your PPT an amazing looking.

Things to remember:

Use Format>Bullets and Numbering to do all the tricks.

Practice:

(1) Open your Microsoft PowerPoint, Select Files>New to set up a new blank PPT slide

(2) Type in some texts, any thing you want.

(3) Select one sentence, choose Format>Bullets and Numbering, there you will see all the functions to change the appearance of a bullet point.

(4) Now, you should know about the difference between a picture and a symbol. A picture is a .gif file, you can create it in other softwares and import it into Powerpoint, and you can only change the size of a picture bullet, not the color. But for a symbol, you can change the size and the color of it.

(5) Go to “Size” to set how big you want your bullets to be in comparison with the word character. Usually 75% would have a nice looking.

(6) Go to “Color”, to set your desired color

(7) Go to “picture” to set a picture as your bullet, or you can import your very own picture by using “Import” (the easiest way is to create 12*12 pixels .gif file in your Photoshop or whatever).

(8) Or go to “Customize” to set a symbol as your bullets.

(9) Done!

You can learn the following tip in just one minute to create multi-level bullets.

Things to remember:

Shift+Alt+→/← will take you to any level you want

Practice:

(1) Select the text, press Shift+Alt+→ to move it to a second level, press Shift+Alt+→ again to move it to a third level

(2) If you want to make it back to the first level, just press Shift+Alt+← two times

(3) It's easy!

Tired of playing around with bullet points and ending up fail to position them correctly? The following tips will solve the problem once and for all. However, it's a little difficult here as you need to remember several hot keys, but don't worry, I will show you the easiest way of doing it in just one minute.

Things to remember:

(1) All the secrets are about controlling upper/lower triangles on the ruler

(2) and press Alt or Control keys at the same time.

(3) Remember, you should never use space to make the indent, it will only make things worse.

Practice:

(1) Go to View>Ruler to show the ruler, as you can see, there are triangles alongside the ruler, the below figure shows the relationship between these triangles and indents.

(2) The indent is the space between a bullet and the text, so controlling indents are all about controlling upper/lower triangles on the ruler and the spaces between them.

(3) You can just drag upper/lower triangle to the position you want to make indents.

(4) To drag one triangle without moving the other triangle, you will need to press Ctrl and drag

(5) For any minor adjustment, you will need to press Ctrl+Alt and drag

(6) Practice more, you need some time to get familiar with the tips of dragging.